The Commentariat -- October 24

Christina Romer, who recently quit her job as Chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers so she could help her son with his schoolwork (right!) is now available for speaking engagements & has fit in the time to write an "economic view" in the New York Times advising that now is not the time to cut the deficit.

Frank Rich never disappoints. "No matter how much Obama talks about his 'tough' new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change.... The loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer. This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage...." ...

... Here's A. O. Scott's review of "Inside Job," the documentary "about the causes & consequences of the financial crisis of 2008," to which Rich referred in his column. Here's the trailer:

Peter Baker of the New York Times: "Although he will not say so, there is at least a plausible argument that [President Obama] might be better off if they lose. The reality of presidential politics is that it helps to have an enemy." ...

... AND Mark Leibovich of the New York Times compares President Obama's 2008 & 2010 campaign speeches.

David Graham of Newsweek: "... the latest NEWSWEEK Poll (full results) shows that [Democrats] remain in a close race with Republicans 12 days before Election Day, while the president’s approval ratings have climbed sharply. The poll finds that 48 percent of registered voters would be more likely to vote for Democrats, compared with 42 percent who lean Republican.... President Obama’s approval ratings have jumped substantially, crossing the magic halfway threshold to 54 percent, up from 48 percent in late September...." ...

... BUT Nate Silver, who is never wrong, writes, "Republican chances of taking over the House are now up to 80 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast model; they had been 75 percent two days ago."

"Boot the Bluedogs." Ari Berman of The Nation argues in a New York Times op-ed that "Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus":

A smaller majority, minus the intraparty feuding, could benefit Democrats in two ways: first, it could enable them to devise cleaner pieces of legislation, without blatantly trading pork for votes.... (As a corollary, the narrative of 'Democratic infighting' would also diminish.) Second, in the Senate, having a majority of 52 rather than 59 or 60 would force Democrats to confront the Republicans’ incessant misuse of the filibuster.... -- Ari Berman

So What Is the Tea Party? Amy Gardner: "a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals an ... organization ... that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.... The breadth of the tea party may be inflated." ...

... Know what the tea party's foreign policy platform is? No? they don't know either. Michael Shear of the New York Times: "Among the more than 100 candidates who claim Tea Party support, opinions about foreign policy range from severely isolationist to unapologetically assertive of America’s role in the world. And in between are many candidates who appear to have spent little time at all thinking about such issues."

CW: Reader Lisa just turned me on to 82-year-old Helen, who blogs with Margaret, her friend of 60 years. A good place to get started is this post: "I can see November on my TV ... so I turned it off."

"A Bill Cosby Liberal." John Gerstein of Politico: "Fox News commentator Brit Hume is charging that race played a role in National Public Radio's decision to fire Juan Williams last week after he made a comment on a Fox show about being concerned when he saw airline passengers in 'Muslim garb.'" Here's the video:

** Stephanie Simon & Stephanie Banchero of the Wall Street Journal: "As budget pressures mount, legislators and governors are increasingly demanding data proving that money given to colleges is well spent."

Being Dick Cheney Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry, Part 2. Amanda Terkel of the Huffington Post. Dick Cheney never apologized to Valerie Plame for revealing her CIA covert status. (Part 1 is here, way at the bottom of the page.)

Nicholas Kristof examines the plights of Afghan women & concludes that "we’re [not] doing favors for Afghan women by investing American blood and treasure in an unsustainable war here. The road to emancipate Afghan women will be arduous, but it runs through schools and economic development — and, yes, a peace deal with the Taliban, if that’s possible." ...

... "DIY Foreign Aid." Kristof has a long piece in the Magazine on American women who are working to improve conditions in underdeveloped countries.

Supremely Bad Judgment. Maureen Dowd makes sport of the Thomases, Clarence & Ginni, much to my delight.

I was surprised by how delusional her account was, but I think she was so desperate to offer some explanation to her devoted followers. -- Nicolle Wallace, John McCain's campaign press secretary, on Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue

I mean in hindsight, she never should have done any interviews. I wish she’d just Tweeted. She should have been our Twitterer. But at the time, I grossly overestimated her capacity to answer questions about world affairs, about how her personal points of view were shaped. -- Wallace on Palin's brain

David Fallis of the Washington Post: In the D.C. area, one gun store, Realco, has sold guns tied to 2,500 crimes, more than four times as many as to the next-highest store. "The Post investigation found that a small percentage of gun stores sells most of the weapons recovered by police in crimes.... For the most part, these sales are legal, but an unknown number involve persons who buy for those who cannot ... in a process known as a "straw purchase." Such sales are illegal for the buyer and the store.... But cases are hard to prove. Law enforcement officials rarely prosecute gun stores, deterred by high bureaucratic hurdles, political pressure and laws that make convictions difficult." There is a related series of videos here, that self-load.

Valerie Elverton Dixon in the Washington Post: Jesus could not be elected to Congress.

Frank Rich writes about the federal government's -- and particularly this Administration's -- complicity in the economic crisis: "Since Obama has neither aggressively pursued the crash’s con men nor compellingly explained how they gamed the system, he sometimes looks as if he’s fronting for the industry even if he’s not." (See more in The Commentariat above.)

Since the Times moderators again axed my comment again, here it is:

Frank's recitation of the Obama Administration's love affair with Wall Street is a huge part of the Democrats' "enthusiasm gap." We expected more than rhetoric. We expected more than a Swiss-cheese financial "regulatory" law finessed by the banks' best friend in the Senate, Chris Dodd. (Gosh, wonder what Dodd will do when he "retires" in January?) And we expected more than that goofy Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. I like Elizabeth Warren, but that little bureau the Republicans don't want her to head up is as big a joke as the Dodd-Frank law. Besides, regulations are only as good as the regulators, and there's every reason to think that the powers-that-be don't want hard-nosed regulators.

When Democrats like me rail against the fools in the tea party who want to bring in Republicans who will fall over for richy-rich Americans and candidates who want to dismantle the government's social assistance networks, we do so knowing we have a dirty little secret. That secret is that we're just as angry as the tea partiers. But, unlike the tea party gang, we don't have a target to aim at. We voted for the guy who won, and he's still the best deal there is. The best deal the American people can get is a bad deal. That fairly xenophobic ad produced by a conservative group that projects the Chinese gleefully taking over the U.S. by 2030 is creepy, but who doesn't have a sneaking suspicion that it may contain an underlying truth? That truth is that our elected leaders, Democratic & Republican, are selling us out.

Here's the spot, which I posted earlier:

We know the Republicans are selling us out, because they say so. The ones who don't admit they want to dismantle Social Security for instance, have renamed "privitization." Now, they're calling it "allowing citizens the option of opening private accounts." Here's Jim Huffman, Oregon's Republican nominee for Senate:

Ah, that's much better. All Republicans promise to repeal the healthcare law, which already is a boondoggle for the health insurance industry & Big Pharma. All of the Republican Senate candidates except one say that climate change is either a "hoax" or, if they're "moderate," it's "unproved science." Look, look, scientists don't present "proofs"; they present "hypotheses." They're just guessing!

And the Democrats? Jack Conway promises to "fix" the healthcare law. He says he's more of a "Clinton Democrat" than an "Obama Democrat." What does that mean? More of a white guy? Joe Manchin is using the climate change bill for target practice.

With the exception of a few brave Congressmembers like Russ Feingold & Tom Perriello, both of whom are in danger of losing their seats, Democrats are running away from their slim accomplishments. Some are bragging about how often then vote with John Boehner. John Boehner!

So, yeah, I get where the tea partiers are coming from. I share their rage. But I remember this:

When I was a teenager, my liberals ideas were so "far out" that my best friend thought I should get psychological help. But, like so many men & women of my generation, I kept pushing. Now, almost all of those things we were pushing for are the law. My old friend probably wouldn't remember that she thought I needed medical attention because I said the schools should be racially integrated.

So I keep pushing. Maybe the next president will be somebody like Sherrod Brown or Russ Feingold or Sheldon Whitehouse. And maybe, just maybe, he or she will be a little less likely to tout the "smart businessmen" on Wall Street. Maybe the next president will put the middle class & the poor first.

The Commentariat -- October 23

The New York Times' "War Logs" page with links to stories on the newly-released Iraq documents & to the Afghanistan papers. The other English-language paper to get the new documents was the Guardian. Here's their "Iraq War Logs" page. ...

... Here's an ABC News report:

     ... ABC News' print report is here. ...

... Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic: "The big reveal from the hundreds of thousands of documents posted on Wikileaks today is probably going to be the incredibly awful reports of systematized detainee abuse by Iraqi soldiers and security forces right under the noses of the American-led coalition...."

... John Burns & Ravi Somaiya of the New York Times profile WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a hunted & perhaps haunted man.

David Hoffman of Foreign Policy: "The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Gen. Hugh Shelton, says in his just-published memoir, Without Hesitation: the Odyssey of an American Warrior,   that President Bill Clinton’s White House lost the 'presidential authorization codes' for launching a nuclear strike, and they were missing 'for months.' Shelton writes, 'This is a big deal -- a gargantuan deal -- and we dodged a silver bullet.'” But Hoffman says Shelton's story "doesn't add up."

After spending weeks trashing all the loons, Gail Collins finally found a candidate to love -- Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin. 

Ashley Parker of the New York Times interviews Clarence Thomas's former girlfriend Lillian McEwen. McEwen believes Anita Hill was telling the truth about Thomas because the incidents Hill described are consistent with McEwen's experience with Thomas. See related stories in yesterday's Commentariat. ...

... McEwen speaks with ABC News reporter Rebecca Cooper:

... Phone Sex. Josh Gerstein of Politico: "The phone call Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife placed to Anita Hill earlier this month seeking an apology for Hill’s allegation 19 years ago that Thomas sexually harassed her may go down as a textbook lesson in unintended consequences. ...

... Heather at Crooks & Liars: "Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' wife Ginni makes a fool out of herself and [Sen. Orrin] Hatch goes on the air and attacks Anita Hill." According to Hatch, Hill is just delusional & the Thomases, Clarence & Ginni are pure as the driven snow. With video & transcript. Hatch warns us,

But don't smear Clarence Thomas and above all don't smear his wife, Ginni. She's a really good person.

... Here's a refresher course on the hearings from PBS. Thomas's likely perjury begins two minutes in:

... Ann Woolner of Bloomberg News: before she called Anita Hill, Ginni Thomas should have called all those witnesses who corroborated Hill's story to see if they would recant. ...

Racism is a lazy man's substitute for using good judgment ... Common sense becomes racism when skin color becomes a formula for figuring out who is a danger to me. -- Juan Williams, 1986, rebutting a racist Richard Cohen column, via Michael Moore

... Paul Farhi of the New York Times reports on the fallout from NPR's firing of Juan Williams. ...

... Michael Moore writes "an open letter to Juan Williams":

Now that you have a new $2 million contract with Fox, let me come on with you for some in-depth discussions about the terrorists' real motivations. We can't let another day go by letting the PC brigade stop us from telling the truth: Terrorists aren't trying to kill us because they hate our freedom. They're killing us because we're in their countries killing them.

Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times: in some races around the country, Democrats are playing dirty, financially supporting third-party candidates of the tea party persuasion whom they hope will siphon off votes from the Republican candidates.

"The Swift Boaters Are Back." Dan Eggen & T. W. Farnam of the Washington Post: "Funders of the stealth campaign against presidential candidate John Kerry have returned in force six years later, giving millions of dollars to independent groups targeting Democrats in the November midterm elections...."

Pat Garofalo of Think Progress: since Americans oppose privitization of Social Security, Republicans are just renaming it. Here's Oregon's senatorial nominee Jim Huffman in a debate with Sen. Ron Wyden simultaneously speaking out of both sides of his mouth:

I have argued for allowing newcomers to the Social Security system to have the option of private accounts. I have not argued for privatizing the Social Security system.

     ... Huffman is a law professor. He knows what he's doing. What "privitization" is is "having the option of private accounts." With video.

Merry Christmas! Chris Johnson of the Washington Blade: Daniel Alter, "a gay New York attorney whose nomination to the federal bench was rejected by the White House over anti-Christian comments he allegedly made, claims that media outlets mischaracterized his views."

Because Charles Murray is a right-wing ideologue, he reads data & draws loony conclusions. But the data he outlines in this Washington Post op-ed are interesting. Murray, who was co-author of the deservedly controversial book The Bell Curve, identifies a "New Elite" (caps his) who "live in a world that doesn't intersect with mainstream America in many important ways." Murray concludes that since the elite don't go to tractor pulls or watch "Dancing with the Stars," they are "ignorant" of & "isolated" from Real America. In fact, he says, "they are not of America."

Washington Post: "With his party's control of Congress hanging in the balance, President Obama touched down [in Las Vegas, Nevada] Friday night to help bail out Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D), an ally now locked in a dead heat with a heroine of the tea party movement." C-SPAN has the video; President Obama begins speaking about 15 min. in.

San Francisco Chronicle: "President Obama starred Friday at the largest political rally of California's 2010 election season [at USC's Alumni Park], imploring a raucous crowd of 32,000 to vote and telling them, 'You have the chance to set the direction of this state, and this country - just like you did in 2008.'" C-SPAN has the video; the President comes on stage about 10:15 min. in.